When "New Dads" Are Thwarted by "Gatekeeper Moms"

From Po:

A few weeks back, when I was writing on Myths of the New Fatherhood, I got some letters. I could have written about this at that time, but I wanted to do some research to support the anecdotes.

One letter was from a New Dad. Married with two boys, one 3 years old, the other 7 months. His wife was absolutely a believer in the idea of sharing the childraising. On principle, she insisted her husband carry his weight. But he felt like she frequently wouldn't let him fulfill that expectation. She often criticized his parenting - you're not carrying the baby right, for instance, or with the older boy, you're not helping him into his clothes correctly. This New Dad wanted their infant to go through sleep-training - moving the baby out of their bed, and training him to sleep through the night. His wife wanted this, too - but at a different pace. And she seemed to hate that her husband had his own opinion.

Another letter was from another New Dad, living in Southern California. He and his wife shared the childraising duties of their two young girls, and he felt fully supported by his wife. Their close friends and extended family saw him as a fully-capable parent. He had spent a few months as a stay-at-home Dad. In his case, the judgment he received wasn't at home. It was at their preschool, and at the playground and birthday parties that he took his girls to. At the preschool he felt shut out. The staff would not interact with him as much as they would with his wife or the other moms. At the playgrounds and parties, he feels he is being watched, judgmentally, to see whether he can handle tantrums or blown diapers. Women are too quick to step in and offer help, skeptical that a Dad can handle his girls all by himself.

I have heard this kind of story often enough that it needs to be addressed. In doing so, please don't accuse me of ignoring the larger story, which we wrote about in earlier posts (Instant summary: men need to do more!). I recognize that this phenomenon - of men being blocked in their best efforts by wives and other women - is a dynamic that affects only the small percentage of men that are New Dads. But among the New Dads, it's a very common experience.

If you're a New Dad out there, and you're nodding your head while reading this, please tell me about your experience.

Sociologists have a name for this, and they've been studying it. Their name for it is "Maternal Gatekeeping." They've attempted the difficult task of gathering data, but none of their data jumps out at me as being particularly decisive or informative. We don't know how many men experience it, and we can't distinguish whether men deserve the criticism (i.e., they're really holding the baby wrong).

However, the sociologists' theoretical frameworks - which have evolved out of their interviews and polling - are worth sharing.

We do know this though:

1. How much time a man spends on housework and parenting has no correlation with how much money their wife earns. In other words, it's not like women with higher paying jobs - usually more educated - have husbands who necessarily carry their half around the house. You might think educated men = more enlightened men, but that correlation isn't there.

2. When it comes to how housework and parenting chores are divided, which is more influential: the husband's beliefs and expectations, or the wife's beliefs and expectations?

Answer: the wife's beliefs and expectations. In other words, she's more likely to get what she wants than he will get what he wants. This is true whether "what she wants" is a traditional division of labor or an egalitarian division of responsibilities.

I'll restate that one more time, to make sure it sinks in. His background and views are not as important as hers. So if he had caretaking male role models, that's great. But it's more important whether his wife pushes him to be a New Dad, and whether she is really ready to share the reigns. That's per the sociologists who study the correlations.

Often, the general public perception that men can't nurture the kids or clean the house as well as women becomes self-fulfilling. Primed to a point of suspicion, wives become watchful and critical, quick to take the baby or the mop and "do it myself." Many mothers feel like they can't completely take their eye off the situation.

Here's some of the reasons Gatekeeper Moms inhibit their husbands from being a New Dad:

• If push comes to shove, the mom is usually the one who is ultimately responsible for these kids and the home. It's not an elective for women, as it is for men. And since they consider themselves ultimately responsible, they are going to make the decisions.
  
  
• Mothers hesitate to share family work because they enjoy the authority, privilege, and status their position gives them in the family.
  
  
• Childraising is so stressful already that it's easier and faster if one person be the decision-maker. A woman wants her husband to help - but not to question her.
  
  
• A man might need a learning curve to master the art of being a New Dad - but a mother can't sit by and just let her husband make mistakes with something as precious as a child.

What results, in these marriages, is a kind of Boss-Employee arrangement. The wife does half the work, but all of the scheduling and planning and oversight. She's the Boss. She delegates half the work to her husband, but with the expectation that he follow her lead and do it her way (and only her way). To their friends, they might look like a modern couple, co-parenting and sharing responsibility equally. Until you catch them upstairs at the dinner party, hissing at each other over whether the baby is ready to go down for the night. He is unhappy doing his part unless he can also be an equal partner in decisions, while she gets over-the-top frustrated by his occasional failures, such as forgetting the diaper backpack on the kitchen counter at home.

How do you fix it? I wouldn't pretend there's an easy answer out of this box. But in couples where there is true collaboration, the factor most cited for making it work is "appreciation." Perhaps, if a husband gave his wife more strokes of appreciation for what she's doing, and she gave more positive encouragement ... the era of the Gatekeeper Mom will no longer be necessary.

If you're a geek interested in more detail, check out the article on "Maternal Gatekeeping" by Sarah Allen and Alan Hawkins at Brigham Young University from the Journal of Marriage and the Family.

Optimist or Pessimist on Education? - What I'm Seeing

From Po:

Being an Optimist on this topic isn't easy. It requires the following:

1. Being stubborn about forming an opinion based on the aggregate numbers, and not letting your opinion be broken by the absolutely tragic stories of educational injustice, which will always be there.
   
2. Properly factoring in the consequences of the immigration boom.
   
3. Recognizing that education today is a continuing process, far into adulthood.
   
4. Understanding that optimism is the only way this problem gets fixed (in the places it's being fixed.) Only by believing it can be better will people invest in their schools and make it better.

When I look at the big picture, the factor I'm looking for is social mobility - an ability to rise up. I want to see children get to college from families where nobody has been to college. I want to see graduate students from families where nobody has been to graduate school.

I was in Kansas last year, speaking at a small liberal arts college in Topeka. I asked the room, by a show of hands, how many of them were the first generation in their family to attend college. About half the hands shot up.

I asked this same question at the University of Missouri Kansas City. And at Rutgers. And at Schenectady Community College, and at Pierce College in Tacoma. Every time, about half the hands shot up.

When you talk to the Deans of these campusses, they have a private fear. They are worried that too much has been promised to these kids. They worry that the institutions and the parents have told these kids that "if you go to college, that's the only way to get a good job." The Deans recognize that so many young adults are being steered to college today that there might be no way there will be enough good-paying jobs for them all. There's a worry that we'll flood the job market with college grads who have to end up managing a Pizza Hut for $9.50 an hour.

So this begets two questions. 1. Is it true, what I observe, that the young are flooding colleges? 2. Will the mix of jobs in the future be in sync with the mix of educated and uneducated potential workers?

I'm going to save #2 for another post, but to #1, the answer is "yes." 45% of the students who took the SAT last year had parents without college degrees - meaning, they are trying to be the first in their family to go. In 1955, just under 2 million students (under age 25) were in college. By 2003, over 10 million students (under age 25) were in college. That's a five-fold increase.

What about older students (over age 25)? The population of older students has tripled since 1973.

This trend is true in graduate programs as well. 41% of med-school students come from families where neither parent has a graduate degree of any sort. 57% of law-school students are from such families.

What this tells me is that our masses - the great big middle class - is managing to get more and more education. Ashley might be right, that we're creating a permanent underclass among the poor. And I feel terrible about it. I'm not pretending that our educational system is serving everyone. But I'm looking at the long trend. there's always been a permanent underclass - that's not new. The average child is far better off today.

Mind you, I'm not saying our educational system is good, and I'm not saying it's bad - I'm saying it's marginally better today, and will be marginally better in the future.

As I noted in my introductory post, being in school doesn't necessarily mean they're learning. But being in school is better than not being in school. I riffed in my last post on the failing academic preparation of students entering the California State University system - students who are supposed to be the "Top Third" of California seniors. On the other hand, look at the University of California system - which is supposed to accept the "Top Tenth" of high school seniors. (Shortcut: if you're a B student, you can go to the CSU system. If you're an A student, you can go to the UC system.) When I was going to college, 25 years ago, it was fairly easy to get into UC Santa Barbara. It had a reputation of being a party school. Today, students with 4.0 GPAs aren't getting in. There are so many bright students entering the system that students with perfect GPAs are being turned away.

In the last 50 years, the educational system has had huge ambitions. It decided to educate the masses, rather than just the few - and it has. It decided to eradicate the disparity between girls and boys - and it's done such a good job that now boys are lagging. It decided to eradicate the disparity between races - and that's working. The disparity is still present, but the gap between whites and blacks is around its lowest, and the gap between whites and hispanics is at its lowest.

Those were huge ambitions. The kids are in the system now, and the system can be bettered. I believe the next 20 years will be a period of very slow improvement at all levels.


- The Immigration Factor

One of the reasons we can't see our own improvement has been the flow of immigrants into our schools. For instance, I live in San Francisco. My son, who is five years old, has been assigned to attend an elementary school about a mile from our house. I'm not sure what I feel about this. The school's test scores have a lot of room for improvement. Compared to all California public elementary schools, on a scale of 1 to 10, my son's future school rates a 7. But it's a school where 76% of the incoming students are classified as "English Language Learners." When you compare this school to the California elementary schools with a similar student body (similar proportion of ELL students), our little school rates a 10. It's not a great school. But it's doing a great job considering the students it has to teach. Will I send my son there? Like any parent, I will do everything I can to get him into a school that rates an 8 or a 9 or 10, or to a school that has only 30% of students learning english. But I'm not going to criticize the district, when they have so many students speaking so many languages.

11 million U.S. adults are "nonliterate" in English, meaning they can't read and write. But of these, about 8 million aren't native speakers of English. They read and write in another language.

In my last post, I mentioned the paradox in a 20-nation study. How can we be at the top or near the top in sending children to college, but near the bottom in English literacy? Answer: English isn't the only language spoken here.


- Education Doesn't Stop at 22

Since I wrote "What Should I Do With My Life?," I have heard from thousands upon thousands of readers who have gone back to school to retrain in another field. The community colleges and adult education programs have exploded. This kind of career-change might be self-driven, or it might be an economic necessity after being laid off. Usually it's a bit of both. But in a shifting economy, people will always need to be going back to school. And here's the bonus: I have found that grown adults can master subjects that gave them fits in high school or college. Usually, when they go back to school, they're motivated - and that makes all the difference.

So, as the academic performance indexes say, some of those students at Rutgers or UMKC aren't learning a whole lot at college. I believe many of those will be back in school, ten or twenty years from now. In fact, I believe most of the straight-A students will also be back in school.

You might be shocked at how common it is to take some form of adult education training that is outside of a formal school. I'm about to throw out a BIG number. In 2003, a third of all Americans over age 16 took some form of training that is outside of a certified school program. That's 68 million people. They did it to brush up on knowledge for their job, and to learn something completely new, and to help change jobs.

So when we argue that our kids aren't prepared, I think we're missing something. Maybe a big chunk of the kids will get their preparation later.


- The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

When you look at schools that have been turned around, how does it happen? It starts with a few teachers and a few parents and a few administrators convincing the rest that improvement is possible. Parents of bright children stop pulling their kids from the schools and sending them to private schools - they give it a shot. Teachers revamp their curriculum and try harder. Administrators change some of the rules to allow these schools to try it their way.

This is one of those social problems where scolding and criticizing make it worse, not better. Only be being optimistic and showing leadership do we make it better.

Money is absolutely necessary. Money works. By and large, the states wth highest expenditure per student have the highest graduation rates and/or the highest number of students who go to college.

But voters hate throwing money at problems if they think the money is washed down the drain. Money will only be allocated to our schools if we collectively have a more favorable opinion that our schools are good institutions and the money will be well spent. I believe that the relentless pessimism and criticism of our schools has created a downward spiral. People start thinking our school system has failed, and so they stop caring when politicians cut education budgets.

This is a situation that calls for optimism and encouragement.

Optimist or Pessimist? (Education) -- In this Week's News

From Ash:

While we're spending a couple days exploring some of the larger issues in education, there are a couple new reports focusing on the successes and failures of the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind" legislation. And both of these reports seem to be grappling with the same issue in much the same way we are: should we be optimistic or pessimistic about these results? No one seems quite sure.

The Los Angeles Times and NPR's Morning Edition ran stories on a new report by the Center on Education Policy on the effect of "No Child Left Behind." The L.A. Times (on 3/29/06) ran "Math, Reading Crowd Out Other Classes," while NPR did "Reading and Math Gain Ground with Education Law," (audio, 3/28/06).

According to those reports, CEP has found that "No Child Left Behind Law" has resulted in students' improved over-all academic achievement, particularly in math and reading.

Of course, there are critics disputing the results because of flawed methodology (I haven't yet read the report, so I don't know either way).

But what seems to be of greater concern and debate is that the students' improvement in math and reading has come at the expense of almost all other school curricula; history, social studies, science, the arts, are being taught less because of the increased focus on the two core subjects. There's a potent argument here. Without reading and math, a student might not have the basic skills to master the other subjects. (e.g., You can't do well in Chemistry if you can't do the math. I remember that all too well.) But, on the other hand, subjects like music and the arts are consistently shown to entice reluctant learners into studying the core subjects, so to shorten those may jeopardize getting those students to be interested in school in the first place.

The White House seems to share the concern of educators on this point -- at least where science is concerned. Today, Associated Press is reporting that President Bush is floating adding tests for science proficiency to the "No Child Left" math and reading requirements.

On the other hand, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has begun her retirement by writing an editorial with Roy Romer (former Governor of Colorado, now head of Los Angeles schools) in yesterday's New Hampshire Union-Leader, bemoaning the President's shortsightedness on focusing on math and science to the neglect of social studies, US history and government. They make a compelling argument that (Cue "America The Beautiful") essentially studies of math and science are commerce-driven -- they're about jobs and competitiveness. But the study of our larger society will protect our democracy -- to help us here as well as help us export our democratic ideals, not just our widgets.

While the debate over the subjects taught continues, there were also reports on just where the act is having the most effect. The Washington Post today ran "States Have More Schools Failing Behind." In that article, Paul Basken writes that preliminary reports show that more than a fourth of the states are not meeting the required progress required under "No Child Left Behind" -- and that some states may be manipulating their results. (But that means that three-fourths of them are.) As the article explains, not only is federal funding, etc. involved on a larger level, but individual families and schools are impacted as well. For example, if states' school don't consistently improve, parents must be allowed to transfer their children out to other schools.

And of particular interest for me was the LAT's observation that the "No Child Left Behind Act" is having a disproportionate effect on urban schools: 90 percent of the schools that have been identified as failing are in urban areas.

Since I'm here -- Morning Edition also had two other features on education yesterday. Of these, I found their prose piece "The Cost of Dropping Out" (a box-companion article to their report "Helping Dropouts Break The Cycle of Poverty,") the most interesting -- quite a fascinating glimpse into how dropping out of high school can impact a person's entire life, from the jobs he holds to poor health care to even a lower life-expectancy. (The site will also has a link to a longer factsheet on drop-outs; it's meaty information as well if you really want to get into this.)

Optimist or Pessimist in Education -- What I've Seen

From Ash:

Do you remember that horrible school shooting -- I think it was last November? Right around Thanksgiving? What a tragedy – a 16-year-old boy shot right in front of the school while recess going on – hundreds of kids who were playing were now suddenly running for their lives. What? You don’t remember hearing about it on the news? But it had all the makings of network -- school shooting in broad daylight -- a fatality -- little kids screaming in terror --

But the teen who died was black. And the terrified little kids were black and brown. And it was the third murder in Mid City Los Angeles in a single week. In other words, it didn’t even make local news.

Not that I had expected it to. Because it wasn’t the first time I had children from that school sobbing in my arms after a shooting. No one wrote about that time, either. Not even me. Of course, I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “It’s gonna be okay, Honey” -- all the time knowing that was probably a lie.

Yes, I get to be the pessimistic one again. But a pessimist is just a broken-hearted optimist, in case you didn’t know that. At least, that’s what’s happened in my case. I was optimistic -- but now I’m broken-hearted, exhausted, and more than a little pissed off. In other words, a pessimist.

Actually, I’m -- well, comparatively -- optimistic about American education on the whole -- how far we’ve come in just a few decades. But at the same time, I’m terribly concerned -- over the fact that we’re also creating a permanent educational underclass.

Today’s Washington Post has a diary of a few high school students in a famously-demanding school with classes in quantum mechanics and a real observatory for astronomy class. I think I’m supposed to feel sorry for these overworked, overachievers ready to storm Harvard and MIT. But I don’t.

Because the kids I know don’t have homework on the weekends, because they aren’t allowed to take books home with them. The kids I work with don’t have pencils. Yes, you heard me correctly. Kids I know just sit in class watching the others take notes, because they don’t have anything to write with. Day after day, they get an “F” on the homework they didn’t do -- because they didn’t have anything to write it down on. There’s no special room in the gradebook for children too poor to buy paper.

Of course, whenever I hear about something like that, I quietly hand the kid’s mom all the cash in my wallet and order her to go straight for school supplies. But there’s only so much cash in my wallet . . . . And I know that there are a lot of kids -- millions -- just like them that I don’t even hear about.

The fact of the matter is that one-third of U.S. school children are poor enough to be eligible for the free- or reduced-fee school lunch program. 29 million children are fed each month. There’s a poignant WalMart commercial about a child who is hungry in his school cafeteria, so his friends give him parts of their lunch. In my experience, it isn’t just one kid -- it’s every child in the community. And the question isn’t “Who needs help?” The question is just “Which kid’s the worst off this week?”

The high school graduation rate has risen in recent years -- and the achievement gap between black and non-Hispanic whites is still there, but it’s narrowing: 80 percent of black adults have high school diplomas compare to 89 percent of non-Hispanic whites. For Hispanic adults, however, just 57 percent of them have a high school diploma. That’s a “less developed world” figure, people, that we should consider a national crisis.

Do we just write off almost 10 million people from ever having an education?

Apparently, the answer’s yes.

And do we stop this from continuing? At least save the next generation?

Apparently, the answer’s no.

I’ve been running a small, free, volunteer tutoring program in inner-city Los Angeles for about seven years now. And, well, I think “start a tutoring program” is pretty much a definition for “optimism.” Since then, we’re a ragtag group, and I basically suck as an administrator, but we’ve helped over 300 children -- some for just an hour or two, some twice a week for five or six years now.

Our tutoring “poster child” was flunking out of second grade when she first arrived. After just six sessions of tutoring, she found herself with the school’s highest score on the annual Stanford achievement test and the 98th percentile in the state. And she’s been at the top of her class in the seven years since.

Am I proud of that? Does all that make me hopeful? No. I’m proud of her. But, mostly, it just pisses me off. Because it’s proof of just how little it takes to change a child’s life around.

And we just aren’t willing to do it.

Everyone says, “We need to do something about our inner city schools” – but when you tell them about an actual opportunity to make a difference -- something as easy as spend an hour to help a child read -- they pretend they didn’t hear you.

We move to neighborhoods so our kids can go to better schools -- then we send our kids to even better private schools. And it’s not that I blame anyone for that: if I was a mom, I’d probably do it, too. Of course you want the best for your child.

But there are millions of kids out there who not only don’t get the best, they get shit. And I mean that fairly literally. Since some of my kids have gone to schools known for bathrooms that don’t have running water. The schools in the best parts of town are the best financed. The kids who already can have private violin lessons get more of these riches in school. My kids need the best school twice as much because they don’t have those resources anywhere else.

In some ways, that the poverty and poor education is so pervasive, perhaps it’s a blessing, because the kids don’t know how bad off they are. Until, that is, they accidentally brush up against the rest of the world. A high schooler I know started crying when an actress asked if she could learn the girl’s pronounced barrio accent: the girl had never before known she had an accent. And more than once a child has come back from a miserable time in Mexico, because they were openly laughed at for how badly they spoke “their native tongue.” I took a promising young 8th grader to a private high school that I knew gave full scholarships. Instead of being thrilled by the school’s endless resources, he was just intimidated by the rich, white faces around him and got the Hell out of Dodge as fast as he could.

So we just lower our expectations. If they don’t write themselves off, we do it for them.

One angelic tiny kindergartner absolutely refused to learn to read. When we asked why, she said it was because her teacher had told her that brown people didn’t need to read anyway.

No, I’m not very optimistic today.

Optimist or Pessimist? - The Future of Education

Should you be an optimist, or a pessimist, about the education a child born today will receive?

Will that education be appropriate for the mix of jobs that are likely to be available?

In the public dialogue, not many are optimistic about this. Good news doesn't make headlines. And the bad news is frightening. But consider this one statistic:

* In 1920, only 16% of children graduated from high school.
* Today, 84% of children graduate from high school.

We're doing a better and better job keeping more kids in school for longer.

On the other hand, "graduating" doesn't mean what it used to. We might be using schools to babysit our children, not educate them. In a 20-nation comparison, the U.S. ranked #3 for the highest percentage of the population getting college degrees, and ranked #1 for the highest percentage getting graduate degrees. Sounds good, right? Actually, in those same studies, the U.S. came in 18th (out of 20) on literacy, and our high school graduates' literacy rate ranked 19th (out of 20). Consider that there are 30 million Americans with "Below Basic" literacy skills, and a quarter of those have a high school diploma. So they graduated, but with a piece of paper, not a basic ability to read and write. On to college the other students go. In California, the California State University system is supposed to be taking the top third of the state's high school seniors. Yet 6 out of 10 CSU students had to take remedial classes, and 5 out of 10 were considered "not academically prepared to be in college" - and these are the Top Third!

Is an average child today better off than in the past? Are we better off sending more kids into and through the educational system, even if the school isn't transforming most of them into the brilliant masses we hope for?

How do Commmunity Colleges and Adult Education fit in?

Pessimism is the easy take here. But if you look at the numbers ten ways and sideways, what do you really see? Should you be an Optimist or a Pessimist about the future of education?

Optimist or Pessimist? - The Basic Framework

From Po:

I'm not going to fix our school systems.
Nor am I going to singlehandedly fix our families.
I'm not going to push the frontiers of science, either.
Nor am I going to ease real estate prices.

But I do care about the future, and I do wonder what my stance on the future should be. Should I be optimistic or pessimistic about the future? My children today are 5 and 1.5 - and should I feel good about the world they will live in, or should I be scared and protective?

Will they get good educations?
Will there be jobs for them after?
Will they ever be able to buy a house?
What will their families look like, and their friends' families?
Will the world be at war?
Will the borders be open to travel and immigrants, or will this become more difficult?
Will science bring important innovations, or will there just be a ton of hype and marginal scientific advancement?

"Optimist or Pessimist?" is a framework Ashley and I will be using over the coming month to discuss various issues.

Each of us decides whether to be optimistic or pessimistic. Philosophers suggest that the benefit of having very low expectations is that when a crumb of good news comes your way, you can enjoy it. You prepare for the worst, and when the worst doesn't happen, you're pleasantly surprised. You never come out the fool if you're a pessimist. Public pessimism is also kind of finger-pointing that applies social pressure to fix more, do more, make changes. There are times we need to get angry to be heard.

On the other hand, optimism is itself transformative. Optimism is encouragement and a pat on the back for what we've accomplished. Optimism elevates people who aspire. We're more likely to invest - and try to improve it - if we believe success is possible. For this reason, optimism might be appropriate, even when the statistics aren't encouraging.

Sometimes, it's worth being an optimist just because everyone else is a pessimist, and it's fun to be contrarian.

Were we generally more optimistic, in our past? I think so, but I wasn't alive before 1964 so I can't really say. If we've become more pessimistic, as a society, what have been the consequences - has our attitude made things better or worse?

On the issues Ashley and I will be tackling, there is evidence on both sides. There's reasons to be optimistic, and plenty of ammo to be pessimistic. I consider them close calls. On some issues, Ashley and I will be on opposite sides. On some, the same side.

If you've read my work the past few years, you have probably sensed my inherent optimism. Journalists aren't usually optimistic - they have to cover so much bad news that they become jaded about the state of our world. I get my optimism from the people I've interviewed. Traveling the country, hearing the struggles of ordinary people, I see such thoughtfulness and caring and aspiration that I cannot help but feel upbeat about the basic nature of people.

Ashley too is a lover of common people, but she is presented every day with problems she can't ignore. Because she tutors children in a central Los Angeles barrio, she sees wonderful children being steered into marginal futures. She is an obsessive researcher who uncovers frightening statistics in report after report. As a former Clinton administration speechwriter, every day she heard from constituents in desperate need of more help. She says I'm more spiritual than her, but I say her religious faith is much stronger than mine. In the posts to this blog over the last month, you might already sense her skillful and shrewd skepticism - such as whether there's enough New Dads to make a difference, and whether single mothers seeking donor sperm is a good alternative for anyone but the rich. I can't predict that she'll be more pessmistic than I, but I'm curious where she's going to land on each of these issues.

Our first "Optimist or Pessimist?" posts begin later today. We'll start with one dear to me, since my son is applying to kindergartens. Should you be optimistic or pessimistic about the education a child born today will receive?

The Petrified Forest - SUMMARY POST

From Po:

* In 1976, 10% of women age 40-44 had no children.
* In 2004, 19% of women age 40-44 have no children.

What's going on here, we've asked? It used to be a tenth of women never had children - now it's a fifth of women. A major demographic change has happened in thirty years.

Is it just that people aren't pairing up, aren't even getting married? We know there's a lot of skepticism about marriage out there, but if you've read WDILTP, you'll remember from the halftime chapter that while we might delay marriage, we still get around to it. For the women turning 40 this year, over 83% of them had already married by the age of 35. And the Census Bureau expects about 92% will marry at some point in their lives. Pairing up, it seems, is still very popular.

The crucial words there might be "at some point in their lives." You can marry right up until the day you die, but biological children have a window of time. And that window is shrinking quickly. I don't mean the window is closing on us ... I mean that a woman today is expected to do some other things before she has kids - she needs to go to college, she needs to gain her independence, she needs to get her career going ... and she has fewer years left in which to pair up with the right person, and fewer years even then to get pregnant. It's no wonder, with all that going on, that another tenth of our society can't manage to get it all worked out in time.

Unfortunately, many women who haven't pulled all that off are labeled as having "chosen" to forego bearing children ... when it's not been their first choice at all.

But this "So Much To Do - So Little Time" explanation doesn't fully explain the doubling in childless women. The numbers are similar for men. Let's be honest: the decision to have a child can be scary. We might be reasonably well-off today, but it seems that the tradeoff has included greater uncertainty about our future. With such uncertainty looming, and with nobody able to see more than a year or two into their own future, making a decision that will impact the next 20 years (having a child) is hard to make.

So when I used "The Petrified Forest" to describe the big group in the middle who's scared of having kids, readers backed me up - yes, becoming a parent can be terrifying. It's hard enough to just take care of ourselves.

Thirty years of divorce culture has been a factor, too. But it's been a factor both ways. For every guy who doesn't want to get married or have kids because of what went down in his own home, there's another guy with the same backstory who senses redemption in marrying and having children.

Ashley looked into the theory that it's mostly liberals who aren't having kids - is that partly why the country has shifted to the right? It might be, if not for the Hispanic women keeping the fertility rate high in the blue states.

So the optimist in me still finds solace in the fact that over 4 out of 5 women (and almost as many men) will overcome all these stated obstacles and manage to have children.

Lastly, we've met some women who have decided to take men out of the equation, at least temporarily. One less piece of the puzzle to find, one less problem to avoid. Sperm can be bought. It's not cheap, and the few thousand women each year who do it are very wealthy and very white ... (37 times more likely to be white than black.) Ashley gave Jennifer Egan a shellacking for the way she told this story, but to me, in a world where it's so easy to be pessimistic and so easy today to find reasons not to have children, I found only admiration for the women willing to raise a child alone.

So I'll put it back to you, readers:

How did you decide whether to have children, if you were a person who had your fears?

And how do you counsel someone (a friend, a daughter) who is confused about whether to have children?

Wanted: A Few Good Sperm -- The Facts Egan Couldn't Find (Or Didn't Want to Share)

From Ash:

I thought more about “Wanted: A Few Good Sperm,” the cover story by Jennifer Egan in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine -- an article about single women who are choosing to have children via sperm donors rather than within marriage or, even committed relationships. I even started doing a little research of my own.

Egan may be even-handed in showing the good and the bad of these specific women, but she is so selective in the facts that she presents about the larger issue that I feel manipulated, rather than free to make up my own mind about what really matters. I don’t feel any more educated about whether or not sperm bank mothering is really on the rise. I don’t feel like I have any handle on who is doing this.

Here are a few additional examples of some of the points which I think Egan should have addressed:

1. There is more data available on the "single mothers by choice" than Egan claimed -- and had she included that data, the piece would have read quite differently.

2. Egan profiled only wealthy women, but she didn’t sufficiently acknowledge that -- or even the costs of their procedures.

3. Egan minimally reports on some women and children’s efforts to find the donors -- but doesn’t report on the efforts by donors to preclude that from happening.

4. What if the donors are lying?


Taking them one at a time ....

1. There is more data available on the "single mothers by choice" than Egan claimed -- and had she included that data, the piece would have read quite differently.

First, Egan begins the article by saying that no one has any firm numbers on “single mothers” by choice, because the recordkeepers don’t distinguish between “single mothers by choice” and unwed teenagers. But she then offers that the National Center for Human Statistics (NCHS) has observed an increase in older unmarried women giving birth. Actually, that information is available from the very agency Egan cited. First, the NCHS’s Fertility, Family Planning, and Reproductive Health of U.S. Women: Data From the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth has tables on women giving birth, by the “wantedness” of the child, as well as whether or not the pregnancy was unintended. And they break the data down by age, marital status, religious affiliation, ethnicity, economics, education. They even include scales on how hard the women were trying to get pregnant or avoid pregnancy at the time. Now, I haven’t analyzed every line of those reports, but I think somewhere in there, they’d have gotten pretty close to giving Egan the numbers she wanted. And if not, a phone call to NCHS would probably take care of the rest.

Since Egan’s article is really exclusively on artificial insemination, she could have reported on the numbers of women who seek medical help to become pregnant. Or Egan might have cited the actual number of single, unmarried, childless women who had artificial insemination as of 2002. But she didn't report on any of it -- and it's all available in that same report.

Instead, Egan artfully reports the number of sperm vials a single company sells to single women -- 9,600. She doesn’t want to tell you how many actual women that represents. She more likely hoped that you think to yourself, “That’s just one company, and that there are many more out there,” so that you’ll multiple that number by "x" -- instead of divide it by the 7-to-15 vials it takes to get pregnant for the average woman.

Here's the numbers Egan couldn't find. By the year 2002 - the year of the report Egan cited - approximately 677,000 women (under age 44) had tried artificial insemination procedures at some time in their life. Only about 55,000 were single, not cohabitating, and childless (i.e. the single mother by choice scenario). So less than 1 in 12 of the women trying artificial insemination are Egan's trendsetters. How many of them give birth? In a quick search, I can’t find a hard number of births for just single women by artificial insemination, but we can triangulate our way to a good guess. In a January 2006, A-1, Times article, "Are You My Sperm Donor," Amy Harmon reported that there were about 40,000 annual births from sperm and egg donation, for both married and unmarrieds. We don't have just the sperm number. (That's a funny sentence to write.) 1/12th of 40,000, minus the egg donors ... we're talking in the range of two or three thousand.

Under three thousand births to single mothers by choice through artificial insemination .... That’s compared to 2.3 million single women that same year who had become pregnant by accident.


2. Most of the women profiled were educated and wealthy, but Egan didn’t sufficiently acknowledge that -- or even the costs of the procedures.

Egan failed to report that of the women who had artificial insemination, the vast majority were white. By "majority," I don't mean 51%, either. Oh no. Look at these numbers: For every one black woman undergoing artificial insemination, there are about two Hispanic women doing so, and a whopping 37 white women trying it. In other words, white women make up over 90% of the women trying AI.

Those numbers are easily available, too - but I'm sure Egan didn't want to quote them.

Not only that -- the reason that Egan’s interviewees seemed to come from privileged or at least well-off economic backgrounds is because those are the only women doing this. Per that same report on fertility, the women trying AI report far higher levels of education, and far higher incomes. They're twice as likely to have a college degree (than an average woman), and twice as likely to have an income "greater than 300 percent of the poverty level," which is the highest bracket the Census records.

It’s true that, in terms of who she profiled, that is who the article is about. But Egan doesn't admit that’s the only group of women she could really profile. Conversely, she just says that “everyone agrees” that the number of women who do this is growing. (Now, if Egan had done an article about that -- “Educated White Woman With Trust Fund Seeks Father for Her Kids” now that’s an article I’d have found pretty fascinating. And I would want to know why that is -- as a matter of fact, I still wonder why these women haven’t found anyone. All I know is most of them seem to serially choose to be in relationships with men who don’t want kids, and, rather than lose the losers, the women head for sperm banks.)

Egan never reports what a single woman has actually spent on the total process to become pregnant -- not even what a single artificial insemination procedure costs. The closest she comes is telling us about the cost of sperm and the fact that one woman exceeds her insurance coverage. (I’m surprised any of it’s covered under insurance at all.) Egan never reports on the costs of preliminary tests, the doctor’s appointments or procedures.

The closest she really gets to saying just how much money this costs is saying that it’s “untold thousands of dollars.” An unfortunate choice of words on her part. Because it is no one’s fault but Egan’s herself that the fact remains untold.


3. Egan minimally reports on some women and children’s efforts to find the donors -- but doesn’t report on the efforts by donors to preclude that from happening.

While Egan mentions the efforts some mothers and kids are putting into finding their donors or their genetic half-siblings, she fails to even mention the efforts the donors and the sperm banks are using to prevent this from happening. Her Times colleague, Harmon, did a much better job at exploring this issue in her January piece. In that piece, Harmon addresses the public health, legal, ethical and psychological issues of identifying donors-- for not just the donors, but the birth parents and the children.


4. What if the donors are lying?

Egan mentions that donors’ sperm is held for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases -- but she fails to address the problems identified by Harmon, and a psychiatrist I discussed the issue with: donors may lie. Never once does Egan or any interviewee ever question the veracity of these purportedly amazing donors’ biographies. She says it’s as easy as buying shoes -- just compare the bios on the internet. But Egan herself has written about how much people lie in things like on-line dating -- when they know they are going to get caught. So for her to never even address this as an area of possible concern is fairly amazing. And the truth is that some donors do lie about their backgrounds: they are doing it for the money. So are the sperm banks: they have a financial incentive to make the men as attractive as possible, with absolutely no way to check up on any of this. And yes, there are the widely reported handful of horrible cases of doctors using their own sperm.

The Petrified Forest – Why I Have Kids (When I Always Said I Wouldn’t)

From Po:

I promised this post last week, so I apologize it’s taken this long to arrive.

Today, many of us face the choice of whether to have children.

The question I want to pose is, “Can you use a rational process to make a decision about a mystical journey?”


Part 1. – High School Philosophy Class

A boy spends most of his childhood and teens unable to listen to reason. Around the age of seventeen, he suddenly matures to a point that not only can he listen to reason, he can use his mind to reason logically all on his own. It’s a thrill akin to a race car. He suddenly wants to apply reason everywhere, and see how much he can figure out, or how much damage he can cause. Anything that defies logic is called out and ridiculed.

In my twelfth-grade philosophy class, twice a week the socratic dialogue ground to a halt. Inevitably, one of us boys demanded to understand how one of the girls could believe in God. If she would just admit that it was a matter of faith, we wouldn’t have had a problem. But when the existence of God was portrayed as a logical conclusion, then we wanted to pick apart the evidence on which such a conclusion was made. Was it the occurrence of miracles? Was it diversity of our planet’s species? Please, tell us, we begged – luring the girls into our new race car.

I made a girl named Drea Cable nearly cry once, and I felt terrible afterwards. That was the last time I tried to apply a logical/pragmatic/reasoning schematic to what is entirely a mystical phenomenon. Just because I couldn’t prove that God existed, I wasn’t going to deny the existence of a God.


Part 2 – Falling in Love

In most decisions we make, there is a point at which we jump from Reason to Faith, from Plan to Hope. It’s the moment at which we turn off the “choice” part of it, and we accept fate.

This is true in love. We try to pick our partners smartly. We look for partners who share our hobbies, who touch us the way we like to be touched, who bring something into our life we have missed. We look for someone we can help and be helped by. We look for someone who pays their bills and understands commitment. All of that analysis takes about 3 seconds. Then we start saying things like, “This is the one, I’ve got a feeling.” Or, “We just have a connection that I can’t explain.” Falling in love goes from pragmatic to mystical in the blink of an eye.

And we accept this. In our society, women talk endlessly about what they’d like in a man. And men think about what they’d like in a woman (without much talking about it). But when faced with an actual choice – a real live human being – that schematic is tossed. We go with our gut and hope it works out.


Part 3 – Do You Want Kids Someday?

When it comes to choosing to have children, we also apply a pragmatic schematic. We tend to overintellectualize. As I wrote in Chapter 2 of WDILTP, “The evidence is tabulated. Every account is weighed – every account of sleep-deprivation, diminished sex life, a promotion passed over, and social events missed. The Petrified Forest sits like a jury, considering the facts, making their calculations, collecting more evidence. In our society today, parenthood is on trial.”

I certainly put parenthood on trial. I kept my own personal list of Pro’s & Con’s. The decision weighed on me heavily.

I had some significant Cons on my list.
1. As the child of divorce, I was all-too-aware of how hard it can be on a child if the marriage doesn’t work out.
2. The financial responsibility terrified me, since my writing income fluctuated wildly year to year.

When I did the math, the Pros never quite seemed to surmount the Cons.

My life was going pretty good, and I just didn’t want to risk screwing it up.

One day I recognized that being so logical and smart about this decision was perhaps inappropriate, and not the way to make this decision at all. I was only willing to “move ahead” if I could be sure that the Cons weren’t going to ruin it. That was an impossible test. I was trying to control the outcome. With a child, you can no more control the outcome than you can use a logical proof to demonstrate the existence of a God.

The real question was, “Am I willing to cede control, and let nature take its course?”


Part 4 – Psychological Factors

My exaggerated fears of divorce and financial crisis came directly from the financial crises my parents had after their divorce.

For a long time, I proudly embraced those fears. They had made me wiser. I considered them part of my basic nature. I wasn’t going to deny my nature.

But then, I got this notion that there had once been a little boy version of me. Did he not have a nature, before his parents split up and had such money problems? If so, what was his nature?

By the time I had this thought, I was almost 35 years old. My parents were long past their money problems. They had stopped fighting each other years ago. Why was I letting that one period of my past (years 11-18) determine the entire outcome of my life?


Part 5 – Observations

Most people who say “I’m too selfish” are actually demonstrating the exact kind of cognitive self-awareness it takes to raise a child. The people who are really too selfish to be good parents never look at themselves so clearly. In other words, the mere act of saying “I’m too selfish” proves you aren’t.

If this ever departs the world of abstraction, and you are presented with a real live child, then I fully suspect you'll go with your gut and hope it works out.

Everyone assured me that if I ever had children, I was going to love my kids dearly. Nobody mentioned how freely my kids would love me back.

The choice to have a child is deeply personal, and nobody should intrude or proscribe.

A Few Good Sperm – Thumbs Up from Me

From Po:

This post regards Jennifer Egan’s cover story for last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on single women who are having babies with donor sperm.

Ashley and I both knew this story was coming out, and we had our fears about it. When we finally got to read it, Ashley’s take was, “Worse than I feared.” My take was the opposite, “Better than I hoped.”

Egan tells the stories of two women, and along the way invokes some anecdotes from another half dozen women. Egan doesn’t judge these women, but she tells their stories fairly, showing us just who they are – for good and bad – and lets us do the judging. I think that’s good journalism.

I came to this article with a checklist of probable/possible falsehoods, having done some research into it myself.

1. Does Egan pretend it’s easy to get pregnant by sperm donor?

2. Does Egan pretend more women are doing it than actually are?

3. Does Egan perpetuate the false stereotype that single women are all alone (many single women have steady boyfriends, or are cohabitating with a man)?

4. Does Egan hide the fact that the women who do this are somewhat-wealthy – that it’s an option, but only for women with a good income?

5. Does Egan ignore the possibility that some of these women are single because they’re too picky, too prone to idealization, or drawn to losers?

6. In setting up the “thrilling logic” of avoiding the ex-husband problem, does Egan fail to indicate that having an ex-husband to share raising the child with – difficult as that is – might be easier than having nobody to help at all?

Quickly, let’s go down my checklist:

1. Easy pregnancy: Both main subjects are still not pregnant by the end of the article, and don’t seem any closer to getting pregnant. The journey looks hard, and it looks costly.

2. Overhyped Trend: Just by nature of it being a cover story in the Times mag, we’re going to falsely conclude that this is a big trend. But you can’t fault Egan for her story getting the cover. In the text of the article, she says its “thousands” of women who do this each year – which it is. (Trendwise, that’s miniscule). Egan dangerously hints that it might be tens of thousands, but she gives us clues to do the math. I wish she had done the math outright, but I feared worse on this point.

3. Single doesn’t mean alone: Both main subjects are actively looking for boyfriends and still willing to marry. Other women mentioned have boyfriends.

4. Province of the Yuppie: It’s clear throughout the article (with one exception late in the piece) that this is the province of the well-paid few – the kind of women who buy Manolo Blahniks and can throw down ten grand cash for sperm.

5. Do they make poor choices in men: During the months the article chronicles, we are exposed to just enough details about one woman’s dating life to draw whatever conclusions we want to draw about the way she picks men. Egan hints at the possibilities quite delicately.

6. Thrilling logic: Egan does come back later in the article to state the usefulness of having help in raising a child – even the kind of help an ex-husband can offer.

Throughout the article, these women make some darn annoying statements. They shop for sperm with the kind of dismissiveness they shop for shoes, they compare babies to dogs based on sheer pseudo-science, and they seem utterly ignorant of the challenges resident to the years ahead. The line that made me wince was when one subject disses a sperm donor because his parents were “pretty boring professionally.” Yikes! To me, this was the article’s greatest strength – it revealed who these women are, and what they’re like. It let us judge. I know Ashley smirked in disgust at those quotes, and she was supposed to: these women were just caught talking out of the sides of their mouth at one point, and Egan nailed them. People say smart things, and they say noble things, and they say stupid things. Egan chose to include some of the stupid things that were said. In so doing, she was bringing some balance and fairness to the portraits.

So these women don’t sound so wise, and they don’t sound beautifully noble. So what? They’re willing to try raising a child, as a single mother – I think that’s a hero’s journey no matter who you are. And I have complete confidence that the wisdom and nobility will come later; it’ll be taught to them, by the grace of raising the child. If they sound selfish today, they won’t be selfish five years from now. Their child will have taught them selflessness.

One line sounds truly damning, at first glance. It’s so juicy it was selected as a big pull-quote by the editors. “My feelings about what I want from men right now are really changed. I don’t actually want a big relationship. Now I want occasional companionship and sex.” I suppose, if you haven’t been around single women raising children, that line sounds atrocious. But hold your judgment. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s realistic. Divorced women with children commonly adopt this philosophy. They feel they can’t afford to bring a man into the lives of their children – its too risky if it doesn’t work out. But they don’t want to be celibate for 18 years either.

"Wanted: A Few Good Sperm" Needs More than A Little Common Sense

From Ash:

The cover story of yesterday's New York Times' Sunday Magazine is an article, "Wanted: A Few Good Sperm," written by Jennifer Egan. The piece profiles single women who are choosing to give up on finding the right guy, but are instead opting for the right sperm donor -- i.e., they're becoming pregnant via sperm banks and artificial insemination. I was outraged by the article and an On Point radio interview of the author. I couldn't stop ranting about it -- until Po asked why this was upsetting me so much. An entirely reasonable question.

I'm not making any moral judgments here against single mothers. I don't object to single mothers who become pregnant via sperm banks. But do I object to the way this story was told.

If Egan's to believed, being a "single mother by choice" is socially-accepted, morally-acceptable, and technologically-successful. It’s the new thing to do.

I disagree. It's still rare. It's still controversial. And it's very expensive. And most importantly of all -- getting pregnant is the easy part of single motherhood. A scant few paragraphs of the very long article touched on the challenge of raising the child alone. By limiting her focus to the pregnancy narrative, Egan presented an idealized, glamorized view of single parenting -- a view that ignores the fact that a child's life is at stake. It was irresponsible, and it just can't go unchallenged.

By choosing to tell the stories of wealthy women, Egan made the process of having a child seem much easier than it is (and by making it seem easy, she encouraged women to try it). The first woman she introduces us to is an executive who compares herself to Sex in the City's Carrie Bradshaw. Later, we meet an heiress with a graduate degree. These are women who can afford nannies. Most of us can’t afford day care – we beg our mothers and neighbors to watch the kids while we’re at work.

Meanwhile, Egan does not include a single opposing voice in the entire article. Not a family member who's upset, a sociologist who is questioning, a minister who says it's a sin, a bio-ethicist who's worried about the biological and moral implications, not even a boyfriend who's pissed that his girlfriend wants to have a stranger's kid and not his. Not one person ever says, "This is a bad idea."

Egan blithely says the social stigma of unwed motherhood is largely gone, and offers no real support for this statement. Did she ask anyone in the Bible Belt how they felt about this? Does she know that single parents stay out of churches because they fear being shamed if they go inside?

If the social stigma is gone, then why did no source for the article let Ms. Egan use their real name?

This was the paragraph that angered me the most:

"Discussion of single motherhood nearly always leads to talk of divorce. More than a third of American marriages end that way; often there are children involved, and often the mothers end up caring for those children mostly on their own, saddled with ex-spouses, custody wrangles and nagging in-laws. Considered this way, single motherhood would seem to have a clean, almost thrilling logic — more than a third of the time, these women will have circumvented a lot of pain and unpleasantness and cut straight to being mothers on their own." (emphasis added)

Egan fails to recognize that the women she’s interviewing - educated women in their 30s and 40s - have a lower likelihood of divorce, and that couples with children are also less likely to divorce. So the justification of "you may as well start as a single parent because there's a one-in-three chance you'll end up as one" is a disingenuous non sequitur.

Egan and the mothers she profiles seem largely unconcerned about anything post-pregnancy. The first woman profiled is an executive, who works extra hours to have the baby, and lives in a Murphy-bed single room. Egan never asks, "So where's the baby going to sleep?" or "You took on a promotion to have the baby -- but what are you going to do when the baby's born?" (Those questions must have been asked during the interview, and the absence of answers in the piece is suspicious.)

Another of Egan's subjects feels free to have meaningless sex now that she's going to rely on a sperm bank. Another, who already has a young child, has a long-term relationship that she knows is doomed -- but she doesn't seem concerned that her son might be hurt when the couple ultimately separate.

Still another one of Egan's mothers is choosing her donor based on his weight, because "If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that's perfect. You don't have to get in fights about food." And she wants the child to have "a darker skin color so I don't have to slather sunblock on my kid all the time. . . . mixed dogs are always the nicest and the friendliest and the healthiest? If you get a clear race, they have all the problems. Mutts are always the friendly ones, the intelligent ones, the ones who don't bark and have a good character. I want a mutt."

That bears repeating. The New York Times is holding as representative of a new wave of motherhood a woman doesn't want to "deal with the father," and who is trying to genetically engineer her baby so that she will have less arguments with the child over food, she won't have to waste time with the child's suntan lotion, and so that the kid will be friendly and not bark much.

If she's representative of a growing trend, it's a Huxleyian nightmare that I hope no one will applaud.

Speaking of Huxley, I was chilled by the ways in which some mothers chose the donors, then began forming "families" with other children born of the same sperm donor. But wasn't the whole idea of this that the fathers weren't necessary -- so why is genetic make-up enough for these women to search for their children's siblings? Still others are happy not to have the burden of a partner, agreeing not to know who the donors were -- but they have already decided they'd find the donors later on, always intending on them to involved with their children anyway. It's a shotgun wedding a la Brave New World.

These women feel free to have meaningless relationships, because they removed the reason to have a meaningful relationship for themselves -- ignoring the fact the children might also benefit from such a relationship. They don't want to wait. They don't want to "deal with the father" . . . until they decide they want to. They don't want to deal with other relatives. These women aren't willing to put up with the most minor of inconveniences to have kids. They can't even deal with sunblock.

News flash: kids are inconvenient. If frequent applications of sunscreen are the worst of your concerns, you are either incredibly lucky or neglecting your child.

In other words, I see little difference from these women and the teenagers who have children because they want to feel important. They're both equally immature, with the same irresponsible reasons to have children. And Egan never calls them on that.

Of course, ultimately, it's how the kids turn out that's really important. And again, Egan doesn't attempt to address the issue. Instead, she admits that little is really known about how they'll fare, but she then optimistically refers us to an unnamed study saying that, so far, they turn out better than children of divorce. That's not a legitimate basis for comparison: children of divorce often do terribly, in large part because of the trauma of the divorce. Show me a longitudinal study of these children compared to those raised in couples, that is controlled for parental education and economy, and then we'll have something to talk about.

I don't think experts can make or break a piece, but if she can't find an expert, then you'd expect that she'd include the reaction of adult children of these women. But there isn't any at all.

Again, when you leave that out of the story -- especially one as long as that piece -- that to me, seems like advocacy.

Now, as I said, I don't have anything against someone being a single mother. They're braver than I am. And I know that single mothers can and do a fantastic job with their kids. But to assert that single motherhood has a "thrilling logic" because it avoids "nagging in-laws," while never addressing the other issues that come with single parenting, is asinine.

And I really worry that there are women out there who are going hear of this report, think it's a growing trend, and look to the examples of these women. They'll consider going to the sperm bank because it's now apparently a viable option.

If you're headed to the sperm bank to be a single mother, bravo. But don't do it without knowing the true plight of single mothers in our country:

1. Half of the unmarried women who gave birth last year are in poverty.

2. Their kids are disadvantaged in terms of psychological functioning, behavioral problems, education, and health. They're significantly more likely to drop out of school, be unemployed and are more likely to have a child before the age of 20.

That Egan's article completely ignored this is why I'm so mad. Younger women will read her article and think, "Hey, this is doable -- look at the internet support groups ready to help me -- no one will criticize me -- and it's easy -- Egan says it's no harder to buy sperm than it is to buy shoes."

My heart breaks for what lies ahead for those women. And I'm really worried for the children.

The Myth of Childless by Choice - One Response from a Reader

From Po:

I just got this comment in, provoked by our thread on the Petrified Forest and the myths of Childless by Choice. I thought it was worth upgrading to a post of its own. It's authored by Julie McGreer:

"My situation is much like you describe: over-educated, married late, infertile due to my "advanced age" at 41 years.

"All along I'd been making choices, but never realizing the full array of consequences.

"That's the deal, though. We don't understand all of the consequences of our choices, and therefore, end up with some pieces of our lives that aren't part of the grand design we envisioned for ourselves.

"I wonder sometimes if these huge aspects of our lives (whether we have children, who/if we marry, whether we choose to be a doctor or lawyer or stay at home parent) involve much choice at all. . . but a whole course in philosophy is compounded into that question, and is much too much for this short space. Let me say, however, that we aren't the only ones who have dealt with such fickle twists of fate. Perhaps the spin we put on our our angst is different, however, in this time, in this place.

"My Grandmother was adopted by her aunt because her biological mother, Sally, died of the flu and my Grandmother's biological "Papa", Lawrence, GAVE UP THE CHILDREN (his daughter and son) because it was improper for a man to raise children alone. Bottom line is, it was probably just too hard for a man to work on dusty fields from sunrise to sunset and somehow care for two small children simultaneously. So he gave them up, writing occasional postcards to his children, signing them "Love, Papa." How hard was that? My destiny feels pretty cushy, compared! What did all of the players think of this then? Probably thought of it in terms of "old time religion", but the feelings must have been the same.

"The majority of my professional life has been spent in the field of human services, and I am also an avid observer of people in my spare time. I've come to conclude that every life has it's challenge. Being childless is one of mine. This challenge slaps me hard against the cheek nearly every day: when my friends complain about the difficulties of raising children, when I see pregnant women abusing concaine, when I hear of a teen mother who believes her life is wrecked by the intrusion of the baby in her womb.

"This may not have been my choice, but it is my life. Ultimately, I believe the quality of my life will be the same, with or without children. It's a big lesson in paying attention to what has been given, instead of focussing on the one missing piece.

"When I am able to do this, I realize how very lucky I am."

Thanks, Julie.

If a Tree Falls in a Petrified Forest ...

From Ash:

Three parts to this post.

Part 1.

In a previous post, I mentioned that in the research on work-family balance, the vast majority of people think they're at least somewhat successful at it.

That's completely bewildering to me. I'm already terrible at the work-life balance -- and it's just me I'm responsible for. I don't have a family on the other side. Perhaps that makes it easier for me to have that balance out of whack (i.e. nonexistent) -- because I don't have kids calling me at work asking when I'm coming home. Maybe they'd force me to realize that I don't actually have to stay in the office until 10:30 pm for the fifth night in a row.

But I’m staying late at work to pay bills. And those bills won’t go down with kids. They'll go up. If anything, I'd have to find more demanding, higher paid work than I have now, just to make ends meet, let alone provide a child a comfortable living. I'm profoundly overwhelmed by the schedule and demands put upon me now. And you expect me to do more? And -- someone's whole being -- his psychological development, his physical growth -- his very life is at stake?

Po's friend meant the Petrified Forest appellation as an insult, but I don't take it that way. In fact, I'd say, "Hell, yeah!" How could you not expect me to be petrified at the thought? There's that old saw about "If you're not scared, you just don't understand the situation," and I think that applies here.


Part 2.

Let me tell you a story.

I was raised to want more. More opportunities, more success, more wealth, more responsibility. More, not less. And nothing along the way changed that. When I was unemployed for a while after college, my mother didn't say "Get a man." She said, "Get a job." When I finally got the job and was on my way, everyone (myself included) asked, "So when's the promotion?" Not "So when's the wedding?"

A few years later, I'd found myself in Washington D.C. working at the White House during the day, and attending Georgetown Law School at night. That Christmas, I invited my family to visit me in D.C. I promised to show them a great time if they got there. They did, and I did. I introduced them to V.I.P.s. -- the men and women literally running the world. Private tour of the West Wing and Oval Office. You name it, we did it.

My tour included a stop at my Law School. Midway through, my bored grandmother interrupts me with, "But all I want to know is when you're going to get pregnant. I've given up on you getting married -- but do you think you could shack up with someone for a while and give me a great-grandchild? I'm not going to live forever, you know."

I stuttered, and managed a quip about how she'd have to live for many more years, until I was out of school and in a good job. But I was devastated. Here I was thinking I was finally accomplishing something with my life, so proud that I could share it with my family. And now, suddenly, after 28 years of pushing me to really do something, it turned out that they couldn't have been less proud, even less interested in what I had done. Gramma didn't give a rat's ass about law school or the White House or getting to see President Clinton go Christmas shopping. All she wanted was to see me with a baby. And my parents seemed to agree with her.

When my grandmother died a few years later, that day was all I could think about. I'd never given her that great-grandchild. In her living memory, I would always be a huge disappointment.


Part 3.

I'm kicking myself because I didn't save the clip. But a while back, members of the Japanese government were debating what to do about their dangerously low birth rate. After the experts explained how women have less children when they are educated, and the more education, the less children they have, one member of Parliament basically asked, "Well, then why don't we just stop educating the women?"

You can imagine the castigating he got for that one. Of course he apologized and took it back. I mean, in practice, it's got to be right up there with "Let them eat cake" for realistic answers to a problem. But I actually give him some credit for having the stupidity to say out loud what everyone else was thinking. Because, for a brief moment, at least the guy saw the problem and admitted that there's a cruel, troublesome myth of new expectations being put upon women.

And some, like me, didn't know that. We bought into it all. Not only that, we were told that the heroines of Women's Lib had made sacrifices for us all -- and we had to do the most with those new opportunities that they gave for us.

But according to my grandmother, every day, I drive to work and take my life further in the wrong direction. Having kids now -- not that I could -- not that I would -- but that would mean admitting she was right and I was wrong and all this has been a waste.

Petrified? Damn right I am.

A Boy Around Sisters

From Po:

Back on March 3rd, my post mentioned that the research on New Dads showed that a man today was less likely to be in the mold of these New Dads if he grew up with sisters. I theorized his sisters might be first to get roped into housework and caring of siblings.

My friend and fellow Grotto-dweller Victor Martinez was reading the blog, and sent along this delicious poem, which made me both laugh and cry. I just had to share it with you.

Victor, by the way, won the National Book Award in 1996 for his novel "Parrot In The Oven: Mi Vida." His book of poetry was "Caring For A House." This poem, Sisters, was first published a couple years ago in a lit mag called Oxygen.

Victor was raised between six sisters; three on one side, three on the other. "They pretty much spoiled me rotten," he said.


SISTERS

My sisters hate me for the shrine
our mother built around my laziness,
the kneeling altar they were forced to care for
and embellish with flowers.

Now they’re tired of my whining embrace, and want
nothing more than to fix my head
between the tumblers of their breasts and
squeeze me like the ripened pimple they say I am.

My sisters mouth a zero
for the faith they have in me. One scolds me,
and with a deadly look of milk, says, “You deserve
the earth to bury you
inside the same grave you’ve tried
to reduce me to.” Another claims there’s
never been any truth to my kingly words,
other than what a crown of shit, attracts.

Don’t mess with us now, brother, say my loving... loving
sisters. We will fly into you on the wings
of our knitting needles, unstitch you
in every seam. Lift one finger to have us
attend you, and we will scorch you back
to the dampened bed
of our mother’s small spittoon.

Petrified Forest - A Geopolitical Perspective?

From Ash:

Yesterday, USA Today ran a piece by Phillip Longman, "The Liberal Baby Bust", which was adapted from his similarly themed piece, "The Return of Patriarchy", in the current issue of Foreign Policy. Personally, I think the Foreign Policy piece is the more persuasive of the two. But both have some intriguing points worth mentioning -- particularly in light of our discussion on childlessness.

In the "Liberal Baby Bust," Longman argues that American and European progressives and secularists have either no children or significantly less children than their religious and conservative counterparts. Longman writes:

"In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.

"In Utah, where more than two-thirds of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women, the highest fertility rate in the nation. By contrast Vermont — the first to embrace gay unions — has the nation's lowest rate, producing 51 children per 1,000 women."

Later in the piece, he continues, "This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry."

Through facts like these, Longham argues that progressives and secularists have a value-system that they cannot pass onto the next generation because there literally isn't a next generation to pass those values onto. Conservatives and religious, on the other hand, have another generation inculcated with its views, and that generation becomes proportionately larger -- and therefore its views become proportionately increasingly dominant.

Longham's case has a lot of intuitive appeal, but it isn't perfect. First, he deals with religiosity and political conservatism as if they were the same thing -- which they aren't. Second, he attributes birth rate to religion and political views, but doesn't address the impact of other influences -- education, ethnicity, immigration, economic status, etc. I think he'd have a stronger argument if he'd addressed those issues.

But this got me thinking. I compared the maps of age at first marriage, married couple households, unmarried couples, in the Census working paper, "Indicators of Marriage and Fertility in the U.S. . . ." the Census thematic maps of educational attainment and family size, and the CNN 2004 Election Results Map. And wow -- all but one of them were almost identical: framed the red-blue states amazingly consistently. Compared to the "red states," "blue states" all have higher ages at first marriage, higher college-educated populations, more unmarried couples and fewer married couples. Each one of those factors, independently, has consistently been found to lower the number of children a woman has. (For example, the longer a woman stays in school, the later she begins to have children, and the fewer she has.) Which supports Longham's thesis.

The only one that really didn't seem to gel was the one that would seem to really prove Longham's point the most: the family size map.

If Longham's right, then I would think that the "red states" should have consistently, significantly, bigger families -- but they didn't. Which makes me think of another key fact that Longham didn't address -- the fact that it's only (largely immigrant) Hispanic women who are keeping the U.S.'s fertility rate at the "replacement rate" of 2.1 -- and, at least, traditionally, we would consider them to be religious conservatives but political liberals.

All of which makes me think that religion and progressivism alone are worthy topics to address, but we also need to take those other factors into account. Perhaps Longham can in a follow-up, which I'd love to read.

Because of those questions, I think Longham's Foreign Policy piece is more persuasive. In that, he takes a broader historical view of how one political view can trump another by sheer size alone. From ancient Greeks to today, the idea is basically that if there are more of you, you win. Once you've won, by sheer numerical dominance, you fundamentally change the society. And, along the way, we can expect the numerically smaller groups to have less and less influence.

Which makes for some really intriguing thinking when we consider the fundamentally changing demographics of the world -- that the Western industrialized nations that have populations that are simultaneously shrinking in birth rate and aging, while the developing world's population is both growing and much younger.

I don't think either article is going to necessarily change anyone's decisions about having children. As Po has said, more articulately than I shall even attempt, having children is a personal decision based on factors and facts only that person can know. But I do think that Longham's pieces do lend further support to the fact that there are larger societal factors at work -- that childlessness may be less a "choice" but an outgrowth of time and place.

(Oh, by the way, if you can get to it, there's an equally intriguing Foreign Policy article on how the Chinese one-child policy is resulting in a societal crisis: the population has become so disproportionately male that there are millions of men who will never marry -- that the culture is now almost institutionalizing brothels as the only opportunity for them to have sex -- that there are so few women that there's apparently a boom in kidnapping them to force them into marriage.)

The Petrified Forest - Myths of "Childless by Choice"

From Po:

We throw around this phrase, "You can't choose your family."

I disagree.

Maybe you can't choose the family you come from, but let's be honest - we do choose whether to live in the same state as our family, and how often to see them, and whether to call them once a day, once a week, or once a year.

And when it comes to forming your own family, we increasingly exercise choice. We choose whether to marry, we choose who to marry, we choose which friends to be part of our local family. We choose whether to bring our elderly into our homes or keep them in their own homes. Women have economic rights and legal rights are aren't forced by law to remain in bad marriages. Young adults can get jobs and move away from their family. Choice is everywhere. Not every aspect of family life is a choice, by any means. But more of it is regarded as a choice, today, than any time in history.

In the 21st century, we are free to remain sole, unattached individuals if we so choose. You can have your career and friends and find myriad ways to help people in need and have a life rich in a sense of "connectedness" - without any of it being family. In the 21st century, if you're going to have a family - be it the family you come from or the family you form - you have to choose to be together.

One of the ways we exercise conscious choice is when to have children, and whether to have children. Of all our choices, it's the least irreversible and carries the most responsibility. It's one of the weightiest decisions we face.

But because of this notion - that having a child can be a matter of choice - throughout our society there is a misconception that anyone without a child must have consciously chosen to do so.

For decades now, the media has been misreporting this phenomenon, and further entrenching the misconception. We agree that more women are remaining childless, for longer - but we disagree that for all these women it's an actual "free" choice.

• Pinned down by financial limitations, unable to afford the life she'd want for a child, a woman might "decide" not to have a baby - but that's not her first choice.
• Married to a workaholic with a temper, a woman might opt not to have a baby for fear her husband will never be around - but that's not her first choice.
• In a career that punishes a woman for leaving the field for any significant length of time, a woman might decide not to jeopardize her career - but that's not her first choice.
• Unable to find a suitable partner, a woman might consider having a baby all by herself, then decide, ultimately, not to - but that's not her first choice.
• Having bought the media hype that she can wait until 40 to bear children, a woman might discover that medical science's magic isn't living up to that promise.
• Having fought breast cancer or ovarian cancer for years, a woman might decide not to put her body through the incredible risk of carrying and birthing a baby - but that's not her first choice.
• A healthy, strong, 40-year old woman might have a uterus that can't carry a child, because her mother took Thalidomide as a sleeping aide in 1964.
• A woman who tutors kids every single night at a church in a low-income neighborhood might "choose" not to have her own child, because she's already got children in her life that she loves.
• A woman who spent her teens and young adulthood raising her younger siblings after their parents died might decide she's already given plenty to children, and needs the rest of her life for her own growth.

Unfortunately, when the media covers this trend, they don't trot out examples like these. They begin with an anecdote about a successful, wealthy professional woman who is married. She could afford a child, and she could carry a child, and she is not scarred by her past in any significant way. She's choosing to not have children, and she espouses the joys of non-motherhood - a career still on track, an uninterrupted sex life, and an active social life.

Then a statistic is thrown out - such as this one, and it's a doozy:

• In 1976, 10.2 % of women age 40-44 had no children.
• In 2004, 19.3% of women age 40-44 have no children.

Percentage-wise, it's doubled.

We, the reader, are left to conclude that all those modern women must be like the woman in the opening anecdote - choosing freely not to have children.

When in fact that conclusion is completely unfair, and doesn't recognize the stressors and limits upon women. (And men, too).

It's harder and harder to get in a position where having children is a free choice. First, you have to educate yourself, go to college, take out loans. Then, you have to get your career started, and get it going strong enough that you can leave it for a year or more. Somewhere in there you're supposed to find a partner. You might also have devoted several years to working hard to buy a home. Then, you have to be lucky enough not have an illness or be scarred the way you were raised. And be in a city without terrible schools.

If you've managed to do all that, and still be under-40ish, then you face the choice.

In my next post, I'd like to explore one particular subset of these scenarios - the borderline cases. What if you're just unsure about having kids? What if you feel scarred and confused by the way you were raised, to the point you've grown up with very mixed feelings about the whole endeavor of being a parent? I heard this so many times, and I felt it myself. I call it a subset, but maybe it's a huge subset.

If that's your scenario, how do you work through the decision of whether to take on this huge responsibility of parenting? How do you tell whether your fears are legitimate deal-breakers, or they're just regular fears that need to be worked through and overcome?

Where Do We Get This Stuff?

From Ash:

Just in case you're ever wondering where we get the statistics and other research we mention in the blog, no, we're not making this stuff up. The original source material -- and much more -- can be found in the related pages in our Factbook, which we really hope you're looking at as well. In our mind, they really go together.

If you have a particular question, please feel free to email us (pobronson@pobronson.com) and we'll be happy to tell you about what we've found.

Are Young Adults Today Failing to Grow Up?

From Ash:

In yesterday's post, I talked about how I'm not convinced that there's a growing trend in the U.S. of "boomerangs" -- adults moving back home. But I did say that there is evidence of a transformation in just what we think it means to become an adult, and that's what I want to talk about today.

These are, by the way, two separate issues -- and part of the problem with most of the articles I took to task yesterday is that they blurred the issues together -- again, probably due to the fact that that's exactly how Viacom pitched the subject to the media -- Failure to Launch was tied into boomerangs so that they could also sell their boomerang-themed book.

But actually, the movie's characters didn't move back home -- they'd never left to begin with.

And that's touching on a much more fascinating topic that is well-worth exploring: the transformation of adulthood.

Unfortunately, just as the articles about boomerangs err on the side of exaggeration, most articles covering this topic have attention-grabbing headlines like "Young People Today Take Longer To Grow Up!" and are written to make it seem as though younger people are basically immature -- that they are either incapable of becoming mature adults -- or that they are simply refusing to, pretending they are still adolescents. Those articles -- designed to make the baby boomer reading audience feel superior, but not meant to shed some light what is really going on -- are easy to spot. They use disparaging terms like "failed adults" and ask questions like "Why Won't They Grow Up?"

Sociologist Frank Furstenberg and others have identified that there has been a significant decline in the number of young(ish) people who have fulfilled the "traditional benchmarks" of adulthood in the past 40 years. These are the traditional benchmarks we're talking about here:

• leaving home,
• finishing school,
• getting married,
• having a child,
• and being financially independent.

It's true in 2000, only 31 percent of men age 30 had done all of those things, whereas in 1960, 65 percent of men had completed that list.

But that's where most media both start and stop (if they've even gotten that far), when it should be just a starting point for their reporting.

Because Furstenberg didn't stop with the decline in fulfilling traditional benchmarks. Instead, his team also found that if we apply a standard of modern benchmarks -- which are defined as: leaving home, finishing school, and being financially independent, and does not include getting married or having children -- then the vast majority of young adults had in fact fulfilled those benchmarks.

But either way, benchmarks can be misleading as a way to judge people. For instance, a woman who dropped out of high school at 17, got pregnant at 18 and was kicked out of her parent's house for it, and now lives alone on welfare - she is, by those benchmarks, fully grown up.

Meanwhile, according to the traditional benchmarks, the following individuals have also failed to complete the process of growing up:

• Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (hasn't gotten married, has no children)
• Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton (has no children)
• Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter (only married to his work, has no children)
• Congressman and former Presidential Candidate David Kucinich (who didn't get until married after having run for President, and is still childless)
• Former First Lady Barbara Bush (never held a job, dropped out of college, always dependent on family's wealth)
• Former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan (no children, and uh, he's like almost 100)
• Academy-Award winner George Clooney (hasn't gotten married, has no children -- George -- call me.)
• Billionaire media tycoon Oprah Winfrey (still hasn't married Steadman, has no children)

Now that I hope we have permanently ended any debate on if traditional benchmarks are the only way to determine adulthood, let's talk about what is really going on.

What we expect from "adults" is fundamentally changing.

We are grown-ups. We just don't have the vocabulary and new symbols we need to prove our case. So we may still feel like we're kids, and fear that, at this rate, we may never grow up.

As Furstenberg and his colleagues explained, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was marriage, children and the ability to support a family that made a boy into a real man. For men, education wasn't really an issue. So men finished their schooling, got a job, got married, and had kids in that order. Which means that men have always completed their benchmarks at ages older than the women have. The day of their "launch" into adulthood was the day they finished school, whenever that was.

For women at that time, marriage and children were synonomous with adulthood. They moved straight into their new husband's home when they got married and they never actually achieved true financial independence. Instead, they just ended their dependence on their parents by becoming dependent on their husbands instead. And thus they fulfilled 4 of the 5 traditional benchmarks of adulthood with a single "I do."

An adult at that time had finished school -- but he wasn't necessarily educated. In 1948, two-thirds of American parents were under 30 years old, and had no education beyond grade school -- little more than an eighth grade education.

In 1960, less than 8 percent of Americans over the age of 25 had a 4-year college degree. By comparison, in 2000, over 25 percent of Americans over 25 had at least a 4-year degree, if not even more than that. Indeed, the population of under-25 year olds in college has increased five-fold since 1955 -- from just under 2 million to over 10 million. But perhaps even more significant is that the percentage of Americans aged 20, 25, and 30 enrolled in school from 1960 to 2000 has also doubled.

So in 1960, most men and women had "finished school" early -- checked off that benchmark -- but they weren't in any way what we'd consider "educated." And experts like Furstenberg now believe that a 4-year college degree isn't just something a select few should aspire to, but basically a prerequisite for just being able to cut it in the middle class.

Another thing to consider is that from the 1960s to 1989, men and women were getting married -- really the defining event in adulthood -- at an aberrationally early age. They were getting married at an age younger than couples got married in 1890! They were so young that, in 1961, the U.S. had both the highest marriage rate and the lowest age at first marriage of the entire industrialized world. Sociologists at the time were worried about it (rightly so, as it turns out -- which is why the divorce rate started skyrocketing a few years down the road.).

The other thing to consider is that, in decades past, there was a clear series of events that defined you as an adult. Schooling, job, marriage, kids, in that order. But now, we fulfill each of those benchmarks separately, and in no particular order.

No longer can a woman automatically become an adult just with a single throwing of the bouquet. Kids leave home at the age of 18 when they go to college, but they may still not have jobs and they're still living on Mom and Dad's dime. (And we don't consider that a bad thing -- instead, most think it's a blessing to be able to afford to do that.) In fact, schooling continues for so long, that many have jobs, get married, and / or have children before finishing their educations. Couples get married but never have children, while still others have children without getting married.

We've also changed what we count as having fulfilled those benchmarks. Just as our definition of finishing school has really become "be an educated person," "getting a job" now means getting a good job. We may not count the McJob as a fast-food server or entry-level gofer as enough to make us a grown-up.

And for women, we really mean financial independence now -- switching from Dad's credit card to your husband's doesn't cut it any more. Even for stay-at-home moms, we still feel like they should be able to work and pay the bills, even if they aren't doing it right now.

The problem is that we still think of adulthood as a series of defined events. And we hurl the labels of the events around. But we don't admit that they mean completely different things than they did 40 years ago. May not even apply today.

Say, for example, a 35-year old working, married mom is an adult. No doubt of that, right? But what if she gets laid off from her job, is forced to be financially dependent on a family member (be it a spouse or parent), and, when she can't find a new job with her experience, she goes to grad school? Is she no longer an adult? That's completely crazy. But it would seem to be true, under both the traditional and modern standards.

The fact of the matter is that we have a new understanding of what makes a grown-up in practice, on an individual level. But we've failed to come up with a new vocabulary for it; we can't quite figure out particular, universal tasks that define adulthood. Rites of passage (graduations, marriage) that used to define phases of life -- now just mark shifts in personal responsibility. For me, the fact that I was legally able to rent a car on my own when I turned 25 made me feel more like a grown-up than when I got my first real job. My best friend just got married at the age of 37. When he told me he was getting engaged, I said, "Wow, congratulations." But it wasn't until a couple months later when he told me that he was trying to buy a house, that I said, "Holy Shit -- you're a grown-up!"

Every newspaper article that broaches the subject of a transforming adulthood, invariably trots out the 35 year old whose mother still does his laundry. (As does the lead character in Failure to Launch.) But that doesn't make him someone who refuses to grow up. That makes him spoiled and selfish -- no matter how young or old he was. The news reports make these people seem babied, when they are really just pampered.

The media reports completely ignore that most of the benchmarks are defined by class and culture. I can't go into the cultural difference in this post, which is long enough, but we have to recognize that Americans expect middle and lower class kids to go out on their own, and as early as possible.

But different rules apply for the rich; we don't expect Paris or Nicky Hilton to give up all the family money and move out of the hotels and houses. We're perfectly happy that the Kennedys all get together at the family compound in Massachusetts and the Bushes have a lovely one in Maine. And their kids aren't failed adults, even if they've never had a job or done anything on their own. If they do accomplish anything on their own, we're surprised and congratulate them. And if rich parents actually force their kids out the door, it's both lauded and controversial. (One of the fathers Po writes about in his book did just that -- and because of it, the guy's now featured in newspapers and having glowing editorials written about him.) And if they don't, we still plaster their kids' pictures on tabloids.

We don't say a millionaire heiress with a personal maid hasn't grown up. We just say she's rich, spoiled, and luckier than we are.

But a middle class 30 year-old has a mom who still picks up after him? He's a "failed adult."

Of course, his mother, who is grateful for his contribution to her mortgage -- one she might not be able to make on her own -- probably would not agree with that assessment.